edit: Anything posted in this opening post (about a year ago as of now) may be outdated! The linked guide is continually updated by powerhouse. /edit

If all your hardware can support hardware virtualization and PCI/VGA passthrough, you can do Xen (edit:or KVM) virtualization, and not need to dualboot. It's like running two operating systems simultaneously. There's a guide here:

It looks like quite a bit of effort. I think I'm going to consider it when the next LTS release comes out. I will probably need a different set of hardware.

Unfortunately, ATi cards are MUCH more likely to be supported. Only a few cards from nVidia are supported, but I saw rumors[www.gossamer-threads.com] on the mailing list for Xen that they might soon see support for them as a patch to the source code.

If anyone tries it, give us a bit of feedback so we know your experiences :) You can also feed back on the Linux Mint forums, which will be helpful to Mint users and anyone who uses that tutorial.

Most of my hardware supports it with the exception of my graphics card. It seems if you want to use VGA Passthrough you need a workstation card, e.g. an Nvidia Quadro or an AMD FirePro (though a few Radeon cards are supported). Workstation cards are generally A) much more expensive than consumer cards, and B) not as well tuned for games as consumer cards. I'd say this is a no-go for most of us. Unless you already have decent workstation and don't mind installing games on it, the cost of a professional card just isn't worth it. Especially when you consider you'll still have a full Windows install on your machine, you're only eliminating the need to dual-boot.

The "rumors" link also mentions some successes with AMD consumer cards, and some efforts towards nVidia support.

Here's another thread I found while researching my current card:http://xen.markmail.org/thread/lma6bbvv7tjrucwpIt's a mailing list, so you have to click for each new post. It's from three years ago. The OP contains a patch for Xen, which allegedly makes VGA passthrough on some consumer grade cards possible. Looks like for anyone trying this, it's hit and miss with nVidia cards.

Hmm, your search of the mailing list suggests that this works with an Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS. That's not only an old card but also a budget card. I guess Xen's supported list has more to do with what their customers are likely to be using than which hardware can actually support the feature.

I may have a crack at getting this to work on an 8800 GT sometime over the next few days. I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah, Wine would probably require less effort to work, but for me, hardware virtualization seems like a more promising solution, even though the effort is much higher.

On Wine, getting a game to run flawlessly is hit-and-miss. With virtualization, getting the virtualization to work right is hit-and-miss, but most games (AAA titles, as is often said here) would work flawlessly, from what I gather.

I think it will only work with KVM or Xen, since they are good at hardware virtualization. You can use QEMU as a frontend to KVM, if you like. I think most KVM users do that anyway.

Ok thanks for letting me know guys. I was wondering if anyone had made a progress there. I know of someone who tried to do this with VirtualBox a number of years ago. He was able to use it for serious gaming, but I think he had some very good expensive hardware for it.

Use a Nvidia Card for your Linux Box and a AMD card for windows virtualization you can have 2 cards in one cpu using Xen

You can also buy a bigger desk and put 2 computers on it. One with windows and one with linux. You don't even have to reboot anymore, and have 100% native performance for all games.

You are missing the point.

With one computer and 2 graphics cards, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mice and 2 audio cards and an hypervisor like Xen you have near speed (>95%) without dual booting or spending money on additional CPU, RAM, PSU, case, etc.